October 3rd&4th, 2003

Shivers about to chop some piggy

Setting up a shot at my parents' house with our Lowe's-made screen

The bouncing head on the car window

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One of the key difficulties in a super-low budget flick is one of special effects. Most of the FX on FOC1 were created and I never got to see them until the day of the shoot.

So you never know what's going to work and what's not going to work. You have this shooting script that you hope to achieve and then find out that the FX prop isn't going to work for what you need.

In this case the head needed to be airbrushed on the spot to get it closer to J.P.'s skin color. We lucked out that my brother was on set that day with his airbrush. He didn't have all of his paints but he definitely worked it closer.

Then, the prop body for J.P. wouldn't really cooperate. It was stiff and kept falling over. It's not really Doug's fault--we didn't have a ton of money to work with so it was impossible to make a realistic body.

To me, the worst shot is the far-away Heston POV shot where the body is on top of the Happy Clown. I should have had Jed(the Happy Clown) moving around, trying to get the body off of him.

But I was busy running up and down the street, trying to watch what we were getting and still direct people. Bit of a mess, really.



Oct 3

The decapitation day.

It went as well as could be expected. Drew a crowd of about 20 across the street. One of the kids did pics and then brought them over for us to autograph.

I think the head looks good—Paul had to touch it up color-wise so it matched JP. The dummy is pretty rough through. Its joints don’t move right. Probably won’t look very realistic. Too late to do much now.

The shot where Shivers walks out and pulls the axe out of the balloons didn’t work. I see it in my mind and it’s pretty cool, but the wind gusted so hard that every time he walked the strings would wrap around the axe blade. Even ended up popping some balloons. Impossible to pull the balloons away without using a cut.

Too bad. It was a “trailer shot” for sure.

We ended early enough I got home to do a rough cut of the decap.

Oct 4

A bit of a clusterfuck. Supposed to be an early day, but the wind and rain blew in and darkened the sky so much that it wouldn’t have matched our day shots. We spent some time doing bedroom scenes.

Mun rigged up a pretty cool setup for a bounce-board outside the window. Used duct tape and a stick. He’s pretty creative with our ghetto equipment list.